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Congo's Child Killers

By

Anna Husarska

Updated July 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

BUNIA, Congo -- "I would like to finish secondary school so that I become an intellectual and work for the new Congo." The declaration is optimistic by any standard, but even more so coming from a 16-year-old boy who was until two days ago a soldier. Like so many others in the Congo, the boy, whom I will call Mambu, places great hope in the elections scheduled for Sunday.

Perhaps too much hope. A lot is riding on the country's first election in more than 40 years. Three decades of state-sponsored pilfering under...